ABO Capital, an Angolan investment firm has acquired Complexo Escolar Privado Internacional (CEPI) in Luanda, Angola’s capital city reinforcing a growing trend among private equity firms in Africa and a possible model for Nigeria.
Terms of the deal for the 768-pupil facility were not disclosed. Also known as the Turkish School, CEPI started life in 2007 and enrolment has expanded consistently, reaching 768 pupils in the current academic year.
The increase in the size of the student body has forced the school to build new facilities and the investment by ABO Capital will help bring the construction project to completion. The move is a first step in building an educational platform for ABO Capital, which plans to open up three additional schools in the near future.
Recently, AfricInvest, a mid-market private equity firm with US$1 billion in assets, backed International Community School, a private school in Ghana, in a preference share deal. The investment was the sixth for AfricInvest’s third private equity fund, which is now 50 per cent deployed.
This is a model that could help bridge Nigeria’s education funding gap and improve both access and quality. Average annual budgetary allocation to education in Africa’s biggest economy in the last four years was N472 billion, 9.36 per cent of an average annual budget of N5.05 trillion. This has left an annual funding gap of 16.64 per cent, that is, N840 billion. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) benchmark for education allocation is 26 per cent of national budget.
Dalberg, a global development advisory firm estimates that there is a funding gap of over US $1trillion for education in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and says there is an urgent need to direct attention towards the education system. SSA has more than 30 million primary and 90 million secondary school children currently outside the system. And with about nine million children out of school, Nigeria has the highest population of out of school children (OOSC) in the world.
STEPHEN ONYEKWELU
